


A Yellow Car

by ellorgast



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: Crystal Tokyo Era, Gen, Shitennou, Shitennou Forums Ficathon, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 06:50:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17844479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellorgast/pseuds/ellorgast
Summary: It's their last summer together, in a town far too small for either of them. A siblingfic about Nephrite and Zoisite.





	A Yellow Car

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old fanfic that was written for the 2012 Shitennou Forums Ficathon. It's a little bit different and I don't think it's what my recipient wanted, so I shelved it after the event and never really looked at it again. However, [CopperCrane2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCrane2/pseuds/CopperCrane2) keeps insisting that I post it, so I have finally given in to peer pressure.
> 
> The theme for the event was Songfics, so I chose [Casey by Darren Hayes](https://youtu.be/NXsORzXKnMs). It's about siblings in a small town, something I really liked the idea of. I wrote it during a summer when I was unemployed and going through a bunch of personal changes and feeling some bittersweet nostalgia. It also dips into my fascination with what the big world events, such as Crystal Tokyo, must look like to ordinary outsiders who are distant from it all. 
> 
> If you're here for my more current fics, I hope you can put up with whatever sounded good to 2012 me.

**Summer, 2021**

The windows of the Kwik Gas were painted up in horizontal lines. The long horizon, almost ruler-straight, sliced cleanly through the panes, dividing each nearly-identical picture into two parts that both looked equally like an aged photograph. The bottom half was all in shades of tan and beige, making it look like someone had put it through a sepia filter. The top was of shades of grey, swirling and murky.

Zared mentally put aside his mixed metaphors of paintings and photographs to wonder whether he could reproduce the heavy storm clouds building outside using charcoal. It was not his usual medium of choice, because the complete lack of colour so plainly mirrored his surroundings, but he liked the idea of getting his hands dirty while doing it. There was something satisfying about the bits of paint caked beneath his fingernails, rimming his cuticles in bright Crayola shades and standing out sharply against the worn counter that he drummed his fingers on. 

Of course, there was colour inside the Kwik Gas. The bold, primary colours of corporate packaging lining the shelves. The acid tones of the swirling frozen concoctions spinning in the slurpee machines. The sort of colour that felt forced and marketed, especially under the oppressive glow of the florescent lights overhead. No wonder it made the prairies outside look dismal.

The highway was as empty as could be expected on a Tuesday evening, especially when one was sitting in an empty Kwik Gas on the outskirts of a town that he lovingly called Bumfuck, Saskatchewan. Zared could not imagine a place in the world that was more devoid of life. Endless flat prairie, already turning dry and yellow with the late June heat. A deserted highway that went nowhere interesting, a Kwik Gas that looked like it should have been condemned twenty years ago. Zared sometimes imagined that he was somewhere truly remote, like on one of Jupiter's moons, just waiting for something interesting to pass by. Someday, when they colonized the other planets, they would build a gas station on Ganymede, and they would stick some stupid kid like him in there for minimum wage. That kid would stare out at the stars and think of how damn boring space was.

Zared Wright, seventeen years old, was on the cusp of what looked to be the most boring summer of his life. He had outgrown this town, filled with small people and their small problems. There was nowhere to go, nothing to see, and no car with which to get there. The only thing with any real value in his life was his art, but even his sketchbook felt too small for him now, and he wanted the means to do something big. Really big. That was why he forced himself into this place of drudgery and dull colors. Big costs money.

The teenager stretched, digging his fingers into thick, strawberry golden curls that were firmly bound into a long ponytail behind him. The corporate work shirt that he wore was an awful shade of beige that he secretly thought made his fair skin look washed out, and certainly did nothing for his crisp green eyes. It was also a size too big for him, because he had been too proud to ask his manager for a women's sized shirt. A men's size small was roughly the same in the chest as a women's medium, but it was longer and wider in the waist area, and the shoulders and sleeves were made for a broader figure. There was a very good reason why Zared was starting to order most of his clothing online: he was tired of the ladies at the Wal-Mart in the next town over thinking that he was a sexual deviant. There was no explaining to people that he just wanted a pair of goddamned jeans that didn't hang down to his ankles. Better to bypass those toxic rumors altogether and become best friends with his Paypal account. He was now such a regular with the post office that he never got asked for I.D. when he retrieved a package anymore. 

He drummed his fingers impatiently on the counter. His shift was almost over, and the sky was threatening to burst open. If he biked home in the rain, his hair would frizz up into a 'fro of epic proportions. The faint reddish glow in his hair would make him look like a slightly drenched Bozo the Clown. The thought was so unbearable that he decided to wrestle with the slurpee machine for a while, to take his mind off of the impending hair disaster. 

The slurpee machine was testy and prone to seizing up, if the syrup-to-ice ratio was not measured with absolute precision. Zared could never manage to fill it without splashing syrup on every possible surface of himself, and so he was in the back, scrubbing purple sugary goodness off his elbow, when he heard the telltale chime of a customer pulling into the parking lot.

The prospect of encountering another human soul was so exciting that he raced straight into the front of the store, neon green sneakers squeaking on the worn tile. He skidded to a stop behind the counter, pushing himself up on it to get a good look through the windows.

Zared gaped. The car was the color of a lemon Starburst candy. Not the blinding canary yellow wrapper on the outside, but the delicious, butter-yellow cube of chewy sugar inside. That was, except for the black roof, and the thick black racing stripes gracing the incredibly dented and misshapen passenger door. It was broad and angular, so boat-like that Zared would not be surprised if it had originally been found floating down the Saskatchewan River. The custom aluminum grille was rusted and beaten, the word Beaumont scrawled on it in the kind of space-age capital letters that they so dearly loved in the 1960s. It looked as faded and well-loved as a teddy bear in the bottom of a twenty-five cent bin at the Salvation Army. It growled like a beast who was either hungry or in terrible pain, or who perhaps was just highly territorial about its gas stations.

He already knew, before the driver's side door opened, that the person who stepped out of the car would be his brother. Sure enough, Neil Casey Wright stepped out of the 1967 muscle car, exuding an aura of pure masculine smugness. The 100-watt grin that he sported as he sauntered through the glass doors was so bright that he could have set his pants on fire. Zared stared, knowing that he was filling Neil with even more glee as he did so. "Jimmy let you take the Beaumont?"

Neil lingered in front of the ten-cent candy bins. He was wearing gigantic mirrored shades that looked like they had been pilfered from the set of an old Hollywood movie. Though his mother liked to say that Neil's chronic addiction to his sunglasses made him look like he was always hiding a hangover, in the mind of a 17-year-old Zared who secretly worshipped his brother, the sunglasses made him the epitome of cool. Really, only Neil could walk around indoors on a cloudy day, and still make sunglasses look cool. With his long, cocoa-colored hair and beaten denims with the rear pocket ripped halfway off, he could have been a rock star. He should have been using those callused, grease-blackened fingers to choke the neck of a microphone, not fumble with a pair of flimsy plastic tongs to load little red Swedish Fish into a baggie. But his grin remained, all triumphant in front of his audience of one, basking in his own glory. "Jimmy doesn't have a say in it anymore. The Beaumont's mine."

He tossed his bag of candies onto the counter, and reached for his wallet in the one pocket that was still clinging to the rest of his pants by a few threads. His arms were tanned and muscular. Even his hands looked muscular, as they unfolded a twenty. Neil's thumb and index finger could wrap all the way around Zared's wrist without any effort. Zared sometimes felt fortunate that Neil had never accidentally snapped any of his limbs when they were kids. Not that he had forgiven him for all those times he had ended up with his head stuffed under a sweaty armpit, but at least there was no lasting damage to be had from that.

Zared was not thinking about his childhood right at that moment, however. He was staring at his brother. "You bought it? You actually bought it?"

The brunette leaned on the counter, looking decidedly cocky. The twenty still sat between them, but he overlooked Zared's slowness for the sake of milking his moment. "Traded in the Chevy half an hour ago. She's all mine."

Zared knew that Neil had every right to be gloating over such an achievement. Jimmy had a lot of prized pieces in his yard, but the Beaumont was one that he was particularly pleased with. Not just anybody could touch it, regardless of its well-worn state. And certainly, not just anybody could purchase it. It was like handing over the adoption papers for the family dog. He had to know that it was going to a loving home.

Zared dutifully retrieved the twenty and started counting out change, barely managing to disguise his awe. "And you drove it all the way down here to brag about it to me, huh Casey?"

Neil Casey Wright had been named for Neil Young, a fact for which he would never quite forgive his parents. The best way to make Neil shout explicatives loud enough to shake the house was to play "Heart of Gold" with the volume turned up. Nobody under the age of 40 knew Neil as anything other than Casey, even though his parents staunchly refused to use his middle name. "I thought you might want the honor of being my first passenger," he continued with that cocky grin of his.

Zared did. He really, really did. Somewhere inside of the blond boy, there was a 12-year-old boy jumping up and down with excitement, but he kept that part firmly under wraps. "Can't. I brought my bike." He feigned disinterest, setting Neil's change on the counter. Pretending to be a lot cooler than he knew he really was. At seventeen, he had a very hard time achieving any level of cool, but it was not for lack of trying.

"Lock it up in the back and have Mom drive you tomorrow. You know she'd do it without even being asked."

Zared made a sour face. That was exactly why he preferred to bike. His mother was clingy--even moreso now that her eldest was out of the nest. He knew that she meant well, but that did not make him feel any less stifled by her constant presence.

But Neil had asked him to go for a ride first. When he had all the friends and girlfriends in the world (or at least, all the friends and girlfriends within the 20 kilometer radius) to choose from, he'd picked his awkward, unpopular, outcast of a little brother first. Zared felt the back of his throat tighten just a little, and he quickly turned to run into the back. "Fine," he called, "just as long as you don't get excited and crash that thing on your first trip out."

***

Nothing about cars really appealed to Zared, despite his brother's unabashed adoration of them. But he could appreciate good aesthetics, and he thought that whoever had designed the broad yellow Beaumont had had an eye for beauty. Although the clouds continued to mount overhead, the maiden voyage of the yellow car could not commence until Neil had detailed every property of his beauty and its extensive history. They walked around the vehicle, appraised the only mildly dented chrome rims, peered under the hood. Zared nodded importantly and pretended to understand while Neil made excited noises at parts of the engine.

"See, they modeled the body after the 1964 Chevelle, down in the States. You couldn't get Chevelles up here, so GM set out to make an equivalent to fill the muscle car market. Instead of making the same thing, though, they put together a sexy Canadian hybrid." Neil threw open the passenger door so that Zared could stick his head inside. He was immediately engulfed on all sides with the sight and smell of newly-polished black leather. "Chevy on the outside, Pontiac on the inside. It's like driving the motherfucking Batmobile."

Zared leaned back out. "Yeah, if the Batmobile happened to be yellow and black."

Neil grinned, as if to suggest that the Batmobile would have benefitted from a yellow coat of paint. "Alright, so it's like if the Batmobile were crossed with Wolverine. I told you, it's a hybrid."

When he climbed into the passenger seat, Zared felt like he was sitting in the cockpit of some alien spaceship that had been built in 1967. The bucket seats tilted back, ready for takeoff. The steering wheel was a thin chrome hoop. The dashboard, with its circular gauges, looked like it had been designed for the Enterprise. Everything, from floor to ceiling, was upholstered in cracking black leather.

When Neil fired up the engine, the beast roared temperamentally, and Zared felt his entire being vibrate. He expected Houston to crackle on the radio and let them know that they were clear for takeoff. It was not the quiet, gentle ride that Zared's mother's electric car afforded, but as they pulled onto the highway, he felt excitement curdling inside him. 

Despite his brother's joke about crashing, Neil took driving seriously. His chocolate brown eyes were intense behind his sunglasses as he shifted gears. His long arms allowed him to look easy and casual while he drove, one elbow resting on the door, the window rolled down and whipping through his long brown hair. He had stopped babbling about the car and its features, now. He flipped on an old radio, Queen blaring through the speakers, sat back, and became one with the Beaumont.

Zared watched the fence posts fly by, feeling like he had been transported to another world. The wind rushed over his face, curled into his hair, and he ceased to worry about whether he would end up with tangles in it. 

"What do you think?"

"It feels like we're flying."

***

There wasn't nearly enough colour in the world, so Zared would just have to carry it with him. That was what he thought to himself, as he shoved about ten plastic electric green and orange bracelets up each arm. If he could do it without losing his job, Zared would dye his hair something amazing and scandalous. He would dump a box of crayons onto the floor, pick up the one that landed at the top of the pile, carry it down to Cutting Edge, and ask Trudy to make his hair look just like that.

It was his day off, and he was going to ogle the art supplies at the general arts/crafts/hardware store downtown. He already had every item on the shelves memorized, but that did not stop him from hoping that they would get in just one more colour of tempera, one more size of paintbrush. He always came away disappointed.

His bedroom was plenty colourful enough, though at the expense of both space and order. The walls were so heavily plastered with posters and pictures--many of them his own works--that there was no identifying the eggshell white of the paint beneath. Every surface was covered with _things_ \--books, magazines, figurines, vintage toys, old pieces of clocks he had taken apart, and interesting rocks or sticks he had picked up off the ground. Not to mention the art supplies, which were everywhere. Paints, brushes, palettes, pens, notebooks, yoghurt containers that were stained with different colors, broken bits of pottery, and paper in any shape or texture to be found. Traversing his room was like walking across a minefield, in which the consequence of stepping in the wrong place was getting your foot painted green.

The color included his furniture. As the youngest, everything Zared owned was a hand-me-down, and so he had been in middle school when he decided to start personalizing everything that entered his room. His dresser was zebra-striped with neon blue handles on the drawers. His nightstand picked up that same shade of blue, and complimented it with bright orange. His bed's headboard was orange, with blue spots on all the round bits. His lamp was horizontally striped in shades of orange and yellow all the way up its length. The fact that he had long ago run out of furniture to paint was a source of intense frustration.

The fact was, the canvas was never big enough. Zared's paintbrush was always running against the edges, always trying to break free, as if he wanted to keep painting right onto the air beside it. He wanted to grab the corners and stretch it out like Silly Putty until it filled his room. He wanted to paint something that overshadowed the sky. 

His previous paintings felt tiny and caged. There was an eight-by-ten inch canvas over his desk depicting polycrystals in sharply contrasting oils. He had sketched it from a quartz that belonged to his mother, blown it up to unbelievable proportions, until only a very small corner of the crystalline shape could be encompassed by the canvas. It was like looking at a single piece of a 200-piece puzzle. Zared could almost feel the frustration in the thick lines of the painting, the notion that the real heart of the painting was somewhere off to the side of it, left unseen because he had no room to display it. 

He pulled on his green sneakers, and hurried to the door. He knew that they would have nothing new for him at the hardware store, but the hope of finding something was worth the journey.

***

Maybe the bracelets were a poor choice, Zared thought to himself, as his back collided with the chainlink fence at the end of the school grounds. They were great in theory, but people just didn't get it. Take, for example, the three guys sneering at him. Zared had been terrorized by them since the first grade. They thought that an insult like "fag" was the height of wit. They didn't understand the first thing about colour.

Zared stood his ground, mostly because he was backed against the fence and had no escape anyway. The boys had started with simply taunting him on the street, shouting insults as they followed him home. When this failed to get a rise out of him, they'd turned predictably more violent. It used to be that Neil would beat up these guys for him. For most of his high school career, nobody would have dared to so much as look at Zared the wrong way. But now Neil was nowhere near the school, and his childhood assailants had become more daring as of late.

He had never been big enough. Never tall enough to get people to take him seriously as they did his brother. He swore that he had as much fight in him as Casey ever had. But when you're a 5'5", 120 pound lightweight, all the fight in the world isn't going to be enough against three guys.

When they left him on the pavement, at least he could say that his knuckles were as bruised and bloodied as his face. Zared glanced at the bracelets, and contemplated ripping them off then and there.

He decided not to give them the satisfaction.

***

The thought of walking home and having his mother fuss over his bloody nose made the boy feel more sick than he already did, and so Zared started walking to Jimmy's. 

Jimmy had to be the last remaining aging hippie on Earth. Zared was not entirely certain that Jimmy had actually been around in the 1960s, but like everything else in this town, he looked like he had been sitting in a time machine for the past 60 years, unaware that the rest of the world had long since moved on. His long, grey-white hair was twisted into a thick braid that trailed all the way down his back. His skin was leathery, as though he had been sleeping in the open air for decades. He liked to wear aviator sunglasses at all times, and Zared suspected that this was where Neil had picked up his own need to have shades surgically attached to his face. Unlike Neil, though, Zared was pretty sure that they really did serve the purpose of hiding Jimmy's hangovers.

Jimmy was one of those curiosities that the locals cheerfully tolerated only because he was so good at what he did. Jimmy knew cars. There was not a farmer or a townsperson for miles who did not bring their car or pickup or tractor to Jimmy. His place was just outside of town, off a dirt road with a cardboard sign at the end saying "Jimmy's Garage." Since everybody knew where he was anyway, Jimmy had never seen the need to advertise any more prominently than that.

The inside of the garage was an alien world of unfamiliar sounds and smells. The echoing, mechanical noises, the thick chemical scents, the cold air that hit his skin as soon as he stepped on the dusty concrete floor. Zared found Jimmy, tripping out on something or other in his office, and he told the blond in a garble of hippie-speak that he looked like he'd made a trip through a meat grinder and that Casey was in the back. Zared liked that Jimmy actually called him Casey. He imagined that this was one of many reasons why Jimmy and Neil actually got along.

When Neil pulled himself out from under the belly of a car, it took only a cursory glance for him to bristle all over like an angry doberman. In his blue jumpsuit, he looked like an escaped convict--one who was murderous. He looked Zared up and down before demanding, "who was it?"

Zared thought that he could have guessed the answer on his own, but he told him anyway. He knew that the only reason that Neil did not jump right into his car and hunt down the jerks that did this to him was because he had never skipped out on a shift yet. 

And maybe, because he had a brother with a black eye standing in the middle of the garage, wobbling on the verge of tears.

Zared couldn't help it--seeing the look on Neil's face made him feel like he was ten years old again, being pushed down behind the school gym where there were no teachers to see it happening. He hated how many times he'd run to Neil in his life, asking him to make the world stop hurting him.

Neil pulled him into the employee's washroom--a dusty, grey space with one blackened cube of soap on the sink and a mirror so spotted that it was barely functional. He wet down one of the thick, industrial-strength paper towels. "Look at me," he ordered Zared, who had been trying very hard to look anywhere else.

He had not realized how much blood was dried on his face until the brunette man had to work to clean it off in broad, rough strokes. "It's not broken," he announced, touching the bridge of Zared's nose. That's one piece of surgery that he would never have to undergo. Zared tried to feel optimistic about that, but then Neil brushed a bit too hard over the bruised side of his cheek, and he nearly screamed. His left eye felt like it was going to explode. Neil folded up another paper towel, ran it under cold water, and pressed it to the side of Zared's face. "Better?"

"A bit." Zared clenched his jaw, forcing the quiver out of his voice. 

His brother grabbed his arm and held it up. Zared let it hang there, limply, and he was again embarrassed to be reminded of how ridiculously small his arm felt in proportion to Neil's hand. Neil looked like he was counting the neon bracelets running down his arm. "I suppose those seemed like a good idea at the time."

Zared mumbled something that may have been a "yes."

But Neil was actually smirking, and Zared slowly realized that it was not at the bracelets, but at the bruises and cuts all over his knuckles. "Did you get any of them in the mouth? You might need a rabies shot."

The blond barely managed a laugh. "That would be just my luck." The thought of picking up whatever poison those creepers carried around in their poorly-flossed teeth was enough to let him endure the stinging solution that Neil poured all over his hand. 

They didn't have any ice around the shop, so Jimmy let him take a cold gin bottle to hold over his face. Neil told him that it was a very good brand to be cuddling up to, but stopped joking when Jimmy suggested that drinking it would be a more effective remedy. "Can you wait around for me? I'll drive you home." 

Zared was relieved--an hour's wait at the shop seemed much less painful than walking home with his face like this.

Standing in the shop always made the boy feel small and useless next to all those big machines, so he picked up his plastic bag from the hardware store and wandered outside. As expected, they had failed to bring in any new products, so Zared had bought a new sketchpad and some pens, just to feel like the trip was not wasted.

The back of the shop was a veritable elephant graveyard of cars. The empty shells of discarded vehicles rose up out of the deep grass like the ruins of an ancient kingdom. Zared stood knee-deep in the dry grass, spotted with yellow wildflowers and purple thistles, listening to the rustle of it whispering around the old cars, drowning out the hollow mechanical sounds in the shop. He liked the way that the rusted, twisted bodies of the cars looked organic, as though they had grown into the landscape. He dropped his bag onto the hood of an old Bronco, deposited the cold gin bottle beside it, and pulled out the sketchpad.

The paper was full when a shadow fell over it, and the faint smell of marijuana alerted Zared that the shadow belonged to Jimmy. His distinctive hippie-mumble sounded over his head. "You did all that yourself, son?"

The sketches of twisted fenders, half-submerged cars, and daisies framed by broken windshields filled the page and ran into each other. Zared had added some creative flourishes when he got bored: a cricket hopped jauntily from one sketch to another, his progress tracked by a dotted line. A car in cartoonish form zoomed along the bottom, the stripes on the side identifying it as the Beaumont, a speech bubble saying "Wolverbatmobile, yeah!"

"Casey, why didn't you tell me your brother's a genius?"

"Didn't want to overwhelm you with the power of both Wright brothers." Neil had changed into his street clothes, and was grinning behind his sunglasses. "We tend to terrify people with our combined power."

Jimmy was peering out at the grey walls of the shop. "Been thinking of painting that wall there, brighten the place up. You don't paint, do you?"

Zared felt like he might fall off the old Ford beneath him. "I..."

"Of course he does," Neil said for him. "He paints all the time. He's the best fucking artist our school's ever seen."

"How about you come up with something to put on the south wall? Kid like you's gotta want some extra money, right?"

Zared had never felt like Christmas had come so early.

On the drive home, his hands were flying all over the place as he described his ideas with flourish. Neil was still grinning at the road. "Aren't you glad I got you the job?"

"Oh whatever man, you're just jealous that you're not the only one working for Jimmy now."

"He only knows you're talented because of me."

Zared huffed into a curl of his strawberry blond hair, but he would not have his thunder stolen. Finally, a canvass almost as big as his ideas!

***

As expected, the sight of his black eye had sent their mother into a fit. When Neil told her off for smothering Zared, the situation quickly escalated into a shouting match that ended with Neil slamming the screen door and Zared retreating into his room. He immediately climbed onto his bed, and texted his brother. "are u coming back?"

The response was quick. "shes strangling us."

Downstairs, he could hear his mother banging pots and pans, preparing to stress-cook. He loved his mom, he really did, but he would very much like to love her at a safer distance. Zared counted down the days that he could escape somewhere--anywhere. Until then, there was only one visible escape. He hit "reply." 

"come get me soon. theres nowhere else to go."

***

There was something about the drive-in that made Zared feel like they were floating in their own little sphere. Just the stars overhead and the technicolour flicker of the movie screen. 

The world was a drastically different place from their parents' time. Their planet had been united under a single monarchy. World peace had (officially, discounting minor conflicts in countries Zared had never heard of) reigned for their entire lives. Magic was, in certain forms, a fact of life. The world had seen a major epochal change 21 years ago, but Batman movies still existed. Hooray for Hollywood.

Neil was a fan of old movies with campy effects and doomsday scenarios. He liked anti-heroes with a dark past who had a gizmo or a super power to solve every problem. Zared sometimes thought that he aspired to be one someday.

"Man, I wish places like that still existed."

"Um, Casey, this is Gotham City. It NEVER existed."

"I know, I don't--not THIS city, just... ANY city. Old brick buildings, giant gargoyles, narrow alleyways..."

"Could you find places like that? I mean, really? I'm not really sure that cities ever were all that much like Gotham."

"Well they're even less like it now. It's all crystal, everywhere you go."

"I like it. I can't wait to see one of those cities that really got hit in the war and just turned into this giant crystal forest. Like Seattle, or LA. Did you know that there's this tiny island off the coast of Vancouver that got so covered in crystal that it tripled its size? And they found all this sea life latching onto it, just under the ocean's surface. They can't figure out what attracts all the animals to it, but even the whales--"

"I'm sick of seeing pictures of it. It makes everything look like a tourist brochure. All big and glitzy and clean." Neil sighed, as they watched a sleek black Batmobile tear through a smoky, garbage-lined street. "I just want to go someplace real. And sometimes, Gotham looks more fucking real to me than a picture of modern-day New York does."

Zared watched as Batman took out seven costumed minions with only his fists, feeling that the conversation had gone wrong somewhere. The comfortable mood had somehow been lost, and Neil looked annoyed with something. Zared fidgeted, desperate to ease the mood somehow. "Well at least they kept Gotham the way it should be. All the other movies keep trying to update their settings to match the real world."

His brother smirked at the screen. "Remember that awful Spiderman movie?"

"When he had to keep that crazed scientist from blowing up the Palace?"

"But they didn't know how to explain why the Sailor Guardians couldn't stop him themselves, so they used some kind of newly-discovered radiation--"

"--that was only lethal to Guardians--"

"--but the producers couldn't kill them, either, so they were just mysteriously missing for the whole 90 minutes--"

"--and in the end he got no compensation for saving the rulers of the planet from certain death, because nobody wants to see Peter Parker relaxing in a jacuzzi. It ruins the whole 'starving hero' image."

Neil shook his head. "Damn Guardians and their world peace. They ruin all the best superhero stories."

"Well," Zared shrugged. "Thank goodness for Gotham."

***

They parked on a dirt road, not too far from the drive-in. Without the lights of the movie, the sky opened up to them in millions of shimmering patterns. Ursa major was now dipping toward the edge of the horizon, glittering against the black pane of glass that was the Earth below.

Zared sighed contentedly, having exhausted his theories on how to improve Batman movies and why this one was vastly inferior to his own ideas. It was one of many reasons why he loved Neil: when he really got going, he could rant for a full hour on something as useless as the evolution of Batman's technology. Picking apart a bad movie was as much fun together as watching a good one.

"Someday we'll write all this shit together," Neil told him. We'll be like the fucking Wachowski siblings."

Zared picked up the thread. "We'll move to LA and make it big. Then we'll wear Armani suits and big diamond-encrusted sunglasses." Planning their future was Zared's favorite game. It always involved moving to a big, glitzy city. He always envisioned what they would wear, what clubs they would patron, what kinds of parties they would throw in their expensive, imaginary apartment-slash-mansion-slash-condo. It was Neil's job to decide what they would drive, and how many women (or select men, Neil had a list) would be in the back seat.

Neil was uncharacteristically silent on the matter. Something about the topic had made the laughter drain from his eyes. "I got a letter in the mail. A few weeks ago."

Something about his tone made Zared's chest tighten in fear. "What kind of letter?"

Neil pulled a folded envelope out of his inside pocket. It was worn at the edges, crinkled, and smudged with the blue dye from his denim jacket. It seemed that he'd been carrying it around for a long time.

Zared did not need to read the letter to know what it was. He saw the return address, the official stamp. His voice sounded like somebody else's when he spoke. "You were accepted?"

Neil nodded, looking out at the stars instead of at his brother. He seemed more scared of the letter than proud. "I didn't really think I'd get in."

"Are you going?" Zared's throat felt tight. The school was in Berkeley. Berkeley felt like a lifetime away.

Neil shrugged, looking unconcerned, except for the way that his hands fidgeted with the steering wheel. "I've got that job with Jimmy and everything."

The relief that Zared felt at those words felt hollow. Neil had talked about nothing but leaving town for years. This looked like the ticket out. "Isn't this what you wanted?"

"I don't know!" Neil growled, visibly frustrated. "I thought it was, but now that I can do it--fuck!" He kicked the dashboard, which was solid and probably hurt him more than it did the car.

Something suddenly occurred to Zared. Something that he'd never considered before. "Are you scared of leaving?"

He'd expected Neil to fly off the handle at the suggestion that anything could possibly scare him. But Neil only shook his head, slowly, like he'd been wondering the same thing. "Everything that I love is here. You know?" He looked at Zared, and the blond realized that he was looking for validation. He needed to know that it was okay to make the decision that he wanted to make.

Zared swallowed, looking down at the university crest on the envelope. "I think you should do it. So I can visit you out there." He managed a big smile, hoping in the darkness that it did not look false. "You need to show me the big city."

He decided not to let himself cry until he had made it home and locked himself in his bedroom. He just barely made it.

***

The rumble of the yellow car had never felt so unwelcome, as Zared's stomach and head both swam uneasily with the vibrations. 

Neil did not seem to sympathize. He decelerated at a stop sign with a force that made Zared's stomach drop to his knees, paused long enough to glare down the dark country streets, then threw the car back up to speed within seconds. He shifted gears sharply, a little too quickly for the old Beaumont, causing her to buck in protest. She recovered with a snarl, and roared down the highway.

Zared clung to the edges of his seat, and tried desperately to defend himself. "I didn't know, okay?"

He was glad that Neil's rage was directed at the road. He looked like he wanted to punch through the windshield. "How could you not fucking know? What did you THINK it was?"

Zared could not think of an answer. Maybe he did know. Maybe he just wanted to try it out, see what it was like, experience what everybody always said was so amazing. Maybe he was just so sick of being the only kid in town who never got smashed on a Friday night.

"Who did you go with? How did you expect to get home?"

"There were a bunch of us. Shade was driving. I..."

"You got into a car with Mike fucking Shade behind the wheel? His brother used to lick paint off the walls."

"He's not as bad as his brother."

"From what I hear, he's fucking worse."

Zared could not remember whose idea it had been, anymore. He thought they were just going out for pizza, but somehow pizza turned out to be "I know this guy, lives way out in the middle of nowhere, and he's having this huge party tonight..."

It did not seem so bad, at first. The music was great, if a little predictable, and people who would never have glanced his way in the school halls were magically transformed into his best friends by the power of liquid spirits. People were willing to let him be one of them, just for that night, and so the blond had flung himself into their world with reckless abandon, drinking everything that was in front of him without bothering to ask what they were called. For a while, he tricked himself into believing that he was actually enjoying himself.

And then it stopped being fun. People got stupid, fights broke out, substances he could not identify were being exchanged. Zared couldn't find Shade, and that was when he started to get scared. He was twenty kilometers out of town, surrounded by people who were drunk and high and crazy on everything, and it was four in the morning. He had no ride home, nobody to watch his back, nobody even to trust not to pass him something dangerous, and he had long ago lost count of how many plastic cups he had emptied or just what was in all of them.

There was an unspoken rule of teenagerhood that you never, ever, _ever_ called your mother up at four in the morning to say that you were drunk, scared, and abandoned in an unfamiliar farm house. It simply did not register as an option.

Neil looked as rumpled as anybody would be after being woken up by a 4:00 a.m. phonecall. His jeans and t-shirt had a distinct "first thing I stepped on when I jumped out of bed" quality, and the brown waves of his hair were curling in every direction possible. But he was thoroughly awake now. Awake enough to be furious. "I thought you were smarter than this."

"Are you kidding me? You used to go out and get smashed every fucking night!"

"Yeah, and you know why I don't anymore? Because those same fucks I used to get shitfaced with are still getting high in their parents' basements. Because I woke up one day and realized I didn't want to become the kind of loser that Dad is. Because nobody who thinks that this is all there is to life ever makes it out of this fucking town. And you won't either, if you keep doing shit like this."

Zared could feel the heat in his face rising. He stammered for the words to defend himself, knowing that he had never once won an argument with his brother, but what he lacked in a sound defense, he made up for in volume. "I make one mistake and I get nothing but shit for it, when everybody knows that you used to show up to class shitfaced all the time. You're the last person who should be telling me how to live my life."

"Maybe I don't _want_ to see you make the same mistakes that I did! Maybe I want to see you do something better with yourself."

"What do you care? You're leaving anyway!"

The car was grinding along at 110 kilometers an hour. It was too old for speed, and it growled in protest. "Would you slow down?" Zared wanted to sound commanding, but the question came out more as an ineffective whine that made Neil push the car up to 120. Signs and fence posts raced up to meet them out of the darkness, whipping through the glow of the hi-beams like a line of soldiers. The pavement blurred into long streaks of gravel, every grain highly pronounced in the headlights.

Zared closed his eyes, and muttered something too low for his brother to hear. Only his sudden change in tone made Neil concerned enough to ask, "what?"

"Pull over," the blond said again, desperation colouring his voice, and he'd already scrambled out of his seatbelt before Neil could bring the car to a full stop.

"At least I didn't get the car," Zared thought, as he heaved into a ditch. He did not like to consider how many ways that Neil would have killed him if he had. The long grasses and purple wildflowers at his feet were going to look significantly less beautiful tomorrow. He was bent almost double, hands on his knees, and the shoulder of the road kept twisting beneath him, threatening to throw him into the ditch as well.

"Probably just like I deserve," he thought. "Oh God, I'll never drink again."

When Neil pulled his excruciatingly long hair off his sweaty face and held it back, Zared felt childish and grateful. He leaned against his brother until the spinning stopped, and decided that he hurt too much to still hate Neil for always being right.

The car moved more slowly now, the rumble reduced to a heavy purr, and Zared had curled into a tiny ball with the window down, the cool air rushing over his face while the rest of him huddled under Neil's jacket. 

The brothers had reached a tentative truce for the moment. Zared was glad that Neil had decided that nothing he did could be more unpleasant to him than five different kinds of alcohol passing over his throat in the wrong direction. All the anger had drained from the brunette's voice as they pulled into town. "Where does she think you are tonight?"

"Staying at Shade's."

Neil managed to refrain from insulting Zared's poor choice of friends. "You can come back with me, but I'm not exactly set up for guests. You're sure as hell not walking into Mom's smelling like the underside of a bar toilet."

"Okay." Zared was glad not to have to make any decisions. His head was spinning too much for thinking. He would sleep on the open ground, if it meant he didn't have to move anymore.

The headlights created a perfect bubble of light, drifting through the blackened farmland. The bubble purred, a great guardian beast that would protect them from the outside world. Nothing could hurt them in here. Not even each other.

***

When he woke up in the morning, Zared decided that he would purchase a giant death ray and kill everything, starting with the sunlight and ending with himself. He tried to smother away the blinding death-light by burying himself in the blankets, but he felt hot and uncomfortable and seven different kinds of sick. He tried to swallow, but his tongue was cemented to the roof of his mouth, sealing off all exits. His skin felt twitchy and hot, his head pounded at the faintest movement. And he had to pee. Really bad.

He tried to ignore this last discomfort for the sake of the others, but there was at least an obvious cure for the need to relieve himself, so he finally emerged--very slowly, like an injured tortoise--from the blankets.

Neil's was as much a bachelor pad as Zared expected of his rock god of a brother. The old flower-printed couch the blond slithered out of was comfortably ragged and broken. There was no other furniture in the living room except the table holding the television up, under which were game consoles nesting in a tangle of wires and Blu-ray boxes. An old turntable sat on the floor beside a stack of records and an old acoustic guitar. A wooden crate doubled as a coffee table, which held a mess of machine parts, pizza boxes, a pack of cigarettes, a few old coffee mugs and beer bottles, and one yellow Post-It note. The note said, "water helps."

He had a vague memory of being guided through the darkened apartment while Neil explained to him very patiently that he felt like shit because he had attempted to consume more than half the liquor store in one go. At some point, he had been pointed at the couch and allowed to collapse into it in any shape that he saw fit. A blanket had materialized, which at the time, did not seem to go against the normal habits of blankets, and his memories seemed to disintegrate after that point.

Zared bruised his shin on the corner of the crate when he tried to ease past it. He found a wall and slid along it until he reached the bathroom. He tried not to look at himself in the mirror. His hair was large enough to devour small animals.

He followed the note's advice, and sipped water tentatively, while flipping channels on the TV. He needed something to distract himself from the small whimpers that kept coming out of his throat.

He landed on a daytime talkshow and let it roll through the latest scandal while he burrowed into the couch again. At least he could pretend that there were people in the world who were bigger screw-ups than himself.

Sometime during the day, Zared re-awoke to a startling sight on the screen. The frame showed a young man, perhaps in his early twenties. His appearance was striking, his eyes keen and intelligent, looking as though they saw right through the camera and into Zared's own. He felt a desperate and inexplicable need to move closer to the television screen, as though he could somehow reach through and connect with the man himself. He wanted to take his hand, sit down beside him, and listen to him talk for hours. He wanted to tell him everything, confess his deepest thoughts and feelings. He wanted to confide his dreams and nightmares. All because of the brief look he received from those deep blue eyes.

And then the man glanced away, and the moment passed. Zared sat back, having suddenly realized that he was at the edge of his seat. "Fuck," he thought, "either I'm still drunk, or I really am gay. Maybe both."

The man on the screen turned to his interviewer, and Zared realized that he could not have been very young at all, because his black hair was streaked at the temples with lavender-grey. The interviewer was a very chipper young woman by the name of Sally.

"So why the mask?" Sally asked, as though she was continuing along a line of questioning that had been leading up to this.

The man smiled enigmatically. "Nobody would recognize me without it."

Sally feigned disbelief, while Zared's mind foggily tried to catch up. Mask? "I think your producers thought I was my agent when I walked in here," the man joked.

Sally gave an embarrassed giggle. "You do look like a lawyer in that black suit. I guess you don't wear lavender on your days off, either."

"He looks too kind to be a lawyer," Zared thought. 

The man continued, smiling amiably. Zared imagined that he would very much like someone like this as a friend. He seemed that he would be a very thoughtful listener. "It's true--I usually only wear the full uniform for formal functions, so when I go out without it, people don't recognize me as readily." The black suit looked quite formal, on its own. He must have been the only person in the world who still wore a black bow tie outside of a wedding, over a crisp white shirt. The red rose pinned to his lapel provided a single splash of colour.

"Has that ever caused problems for you? Aside from my producers mistaking you for your agent, I mean."

"I got pulled over once."

"On your motorcycle?"

"Of course."

"What did the officer say when he saw your license?"

"He didn't believe me, of course. He thought it was a fake ID. I almost got arrested for identity theft."

Sally found this hilarious, and the man continued to smile placidly while she giggled. Zared got the feeling that he was humoring her. "Does it really change your appearance that much?"

"Well," the man reached inside his jacket and pulled out a thin object. "You tell me." At the moment that he held it up over the bridge of his nose, Zared gasped. At seventeen, he had only the most cursory knowledge of world politics. It was the Queen's shining face that graced all the newspaper headlines and postage stamps. The Queen, and her Guardians, were the face of Crystal Tokyo. But even he knew the purple domino mask of the reclusive King Endymion. Even out here, in the middle of Saskatchewan, he knew this face.

He had never considered that the King was a real person. A person who laughed and wore suits with red roses and drove motorcycles and did it badly enough to get pulled over.

"It's just a symbol," the King was saying, rolling the mask lightly between his fingers as though it were any ordinary object, like a pencil or a set of keys. "This is what the world first saw me as."

"Do you ever feel like you're literally performing a masquerade as King Endymion?"

"When I was younger, maybe. I've been doing this too long to wonder which part is the real me. Everybody plays a role, even if they don't wear a physical mask to do it. It's all still part of you, the light and the dark and the crazy bits that still think putting on a lavender cape is a great idea. People change, but nobody ever really forgets who they are."

Zared pulled the blanket tighter around him. Some part of him worried that that was exactly what Neil would do. That he would leave this town, and he would never come back. That he would forget everything they had together. 

More than that, Zared worried that without his brother to rescue him, he would lose himself too. That he was only really Zared when he was with Neil. He had only a year left of high school and of living with his mother and all his obligation to stay in this town. A year seemed like an excruciatingly long time.

The interviewer breezed through a few other questions that Zared missed. "Do you ever miss those days?"

"Surprisingly enough, sometimes I do. I don't miss the fighting or the secrets, but everything else... the new relationships, the discovery, all the optimism and new possibility. It was fun, sometimes. We all became unbelievably close back then--we had to, the whole world seemed like it was against us. Even though we all have different duties now, there's no reducing that. The Guardians, we're all like family. You like seeing your family reach a good place in life. Everything we had to put on hold while we were fighting, we're able to do now. Staying the way we were, keeping ourselves from achieving what we wanted, that probably would have torn us apart eventually."

"What has peacetime given you that you couldn't do before?" 

"Be with my wife and daughter, most of all. Finish my degree. Work part time at the hospital."

"Get a motorcycle?"

"Get a _bigger_ motorcycle."

***

It had taken the entire summer, but the mural was finished. When the guys at the garage stood outside, appraising it silently, Jimmy babbled for half an hour about how Zared was the next Picasso and he better be goddamn signing that thing so it would be worth millions one day. Zared could hardly contain his pride, even with paint smeared all over his shirt and halfway up his neck. He'd got paint in his hair, but he did not even care. Beside him, Neil was beaming behind his sunglasses. "You had to use the Beaumont, huh?"

Zared shrugged. "I liked the colour."

Above him, the Beaumont was bigger and more vivid than life, flying through space with multicolour movement lines streaking beneath it. The planets behind it practically glowed against the purple night sky. Zared had seen enough of his van to know that Jimmy had an appreciation for classic fantasy art, the kind that had big-breasted women riding motorcycles over the heads of purple dragons. He liked the mood of it, but he wanted to make it more special than that. For one thing, there were no D-cups. But there was a dragon in the distance, just like there were paper cranes all around the car, tiny flames leaping off their wings like small phoenixes in flight.

"Why are there paper cranes?"

"They're flying."

"Why are they on fire?"

"It's art, Neil. Don't try to understand."

The bottom of the mural was a cityscape. One half was jagged, like crystal. The other was squarish, a series of long rectangles like old skyscrapers. There were gargoyles in it. 

Jimmy turned to him. "You got a name for this thing, kid?"

Zared was bad at names. "I guess it's called 'Freedom.'"

***

**Summer, 2039**

"It's not even sunny. Don't you ever take those things off?"

"They've been surgically attached to his face since he was 19." Zoisite leaned between the two front seats, feeling too left out in the back to stay there.

Venus pinched the bridge of her nose as she leaned against the passenger side door. "Remind me why I must accompany you two children on this mission, again?"

"Hey, we can't all be old maids like you, Venus." Zoisite narrowly dodged an elbow heading for his face.

"Shove it, Wright. I'm still young enough to kick your ass."

"This is a matter of diplomacy, Venus," Nephrite told her from behind mirrored shades. "We dearly need your company."

"Choosing the Queen's car is not a matter of diplomacy."

"Choosing the Queen's FIRST car is. She's going to be 61 in July; it's about time she got the perfect car."

Zoisite cleared his throat delicately. "You may have... missed some of last night's discussion on the matter."

The leader of the Guardians buried her face in her hand. "Don't tell me..."

"Nephrite and Uranus have very... strong views on the issue."

The brunette man gripped the steering wheel tighter. "All I'm saying is, a Ferrari is not the kind of thing for a lady in her position--"

"Are you sure you're not bringing me along as a bodyguard?"

"I don't know about anyone else, but I'm bringing you along to prevent civil war," Zoisite informed her importantly. 

"Why are you even here? You hate cars as much as I do."

"Of course I do. I'm just along for the ride."


End file.
